Invisible Ink
by blahosaurus
Summary: When TenTen speaks, her words are just air.


_**Invisible Ink**_

My mother died when I was fourteen. It was five months after the chuunin exams, when everything seemed to have blown over. My dad entered my room, where I was cleaning my weapons, and looked at me with an expression, a _feeling___I had never seen on any face before.

_I'm sorry_ it said. _I'm so sorry_.

When the words left his mouth to scar the air between me and everything else that existed, I didn't know what to do. Crying didn't even cross my mind because most of me wanted to laugh. _Don't be ridiculous_, I wanted to say. For a moment I sat there and stared at him, his red rimmed eyes and his shaking lip as I thought, _don't be..._

I didn't cry. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day I wanted to cry. I just _couldn't_.

I didn't tell my team. She had been a civilian so they were not informed. Two days after her death I rejoined Team Gai.

Lee said, "**Ten-Ten!** You have not been with us for two days of your youth! Are you feeling rejuvenated enough to continue your path of strength?"

I smiled at him, a disgusting, pale, sickly smile and replied, _"_I'm fine." What was the difference between being fine and not fine anyway? Dead, and not dead?

They didn't notice a change in me. They didn't notice that I only laughed at Gai's jokes for the sake of laughing. They didn't notice that every few hours I wanted to cry, but something in me refused my pleas to let go, saying, _don't be pathetic_. I would yank my jutsu-parchment out and think, _don't be..._

I would watch my team and scream in my head, actually scream the words,

**WHY DON'T **_**YOU NOTICE THAT I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO **__**DO**__** ANYMORE?!**_

But Neji would just regard me with a bored glance and say, _look alive, Ten-ten._

Look alive.

OoO

The nightmares didn't start straight away. They seemed to seep in, as if a pressure was building up inside me. They would be simple. I would be with my mother, doing anything. Walking, or cooking, or working. And all the while there was the most terrible, marrow-eating fear in my bones, at the back of my throat, rimming my eyes. I didn't know why, I never knew _why_. I wanted to warn her so desperately, but I had nothing to say, nothing to caution her against. And always, always I moved away from her to look for this danger only to realise; that was it, that was my mistake. And when I went back to her, I didn't find her on the floor or mangled or cold. She was simply gone.

And it was my fault.

And so, slowly, I started to lose myself. It begun as a habit of putting up a front in order not to worry people over her death. I was amazed at how easy it was, how people bought it. Everybody. Dad, Gai, Lee, Neji.

I was...relieved.

But then I started to get over my mother's death. I moved on, and yet I still felt...sad. Inside me the memory of my mother was a fresh but healing wound, and yet the smiles were as fake, the enthusiasm as carved out of willpower as ever. A year went by. And gradually I realised that every single person had not seen the real me for over twelve months. For over forty-eight weeks they had been consorting with an imposter and they had missed to notice it. I could have disappeared completely, leaving nothing but my shell behind, with her filthy smiles and shiny weapons and lack of tears and no one, for the rest of history, would know. I could disappear and leave nothing, _nothing,_ of myself behind.

And so my nightmares changed.

Every night I would dream of myself. I would sit somewhere, and sitting beside me would be me. Not another me, like a Kage Bunshin, not a replica, but a different part of me. We would sit there quietly until suddenly I would turn to myself and say,

"Don't wake up. Please. I don't want to die."

I would look at myself and I knew, could feel it on my face, that I had the same expression on as my father that night.

_I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. _

And every time I woke up, I had lost that little shred of what was Ten-Ten

_OoO_

Nothing seemed to change. I was stuck in this No Man's Land, this empty vacuum of space, unable to move. Not backwards, not forwards. I was just _there_.

On the 5th of November that next year we went off into a mission. It was the first A Class that we did without Gai, and Neji was our team leader. If I had been Lee I would have been a little annoyed but I was Ten-Ten. Why should I care about a thing I would never be able to achieve, right?

As was expected, it didn't go 'surprisingly well'. It went bad, like A Class missions are supposed to be. We were constantly badgered with attacks, not only to obtain the parchment of information we held but also from common thieves that, even though not difficult to dispatch, were still a nuisance to deal with.

On the fourth day of travel, however, the heavy artillery was pulled out.

Six ninjas attacked us at once. Nenji sensed them a couple of seconds before they revealed themselves and we positioned ourselves in formation, following his orders without hesitation. In the back of my mind I though,

_Will this be the day I disappear completely? _

In theory, we were a magnificent team. A boy who was practically unbeaten in speed and hand-to-hand fighting, a Hyuuga for strength and scouting and me to back them up both with my long-range fighting.

But there is one problem with absolute rules. When you write something down, it does not change reality. The naturalistic fallacy of words is crucial; to say someone ought to do something does not mean them will. Writing that we must be just ninjas, and not humans, does not erase that we are animals.

Neji was too arrogant and lacked the empathy needed in a good leader. Lee was insane, had no sense of proportion. I, disregarded.

And so that fight started like every other fight. The boys threw themselves into the battle whilst I was left, assumed struggling and dealing with the edge-fighters; the weak ones. But I could tell the attackers were strong, and flinging about a few exploding kunai were not going to cut it.

So, fending off the other long-rangers, I prepared a trap around the area, pulling wires and explosions and keeping a steady eye on my teammates, weaving my deadly art like a spider ready to strike.

The leader had figured out Neji's weakness and the enemies worked well together, making a good defence which made things harder for Lee. But I was barely interrupted in my doings and I imagined that I must be difficult to see, with my edges blurring like this, with all the pieces that were missing.

Everything was set. Time to fly.

"Neji! Lee! Trap number 13, move!" I shouted in our code-language made for those types of situation and as I had been trained to do did not hesitate in initiating the attack, pulling the initiating wire. It was with only horror that I saw Neji and Lee not even flinch at my words. They didn't leap away or even duck. My warning had fallen short of its purpose, my words just air instead of meaning. I might as well have mouthed them, or thought them only.

It was a thrilling, powerful, deadly, sickening realisation to have, knowing that you are about to slaughter your teammates.

In a single moment I cut one of the wires, using it to propel myself forward, and blunting it with chakra to catch Lee as an explosion went off, then another, another as I grabbed Neji by the shirt and dragged him with me. There was the shrieking, whirling sound of wires slicing the air. I didn't know if the dead weight in my hands were corpses or just surprise. There were screams of agony and maybe I myself was shouting because there seemed to be a perpetual ringing as the blasts suffocated the air with road-dust. I couldn't see anything as I dropped to the ground, slinging my boys with me, crashing them to the floor and oh God, oh God I was going to throw up. At least one of them was decapitated. My hands were colding a collar and no more. It was Neji. I couldn't see it but I could feel it, he had nothing above the neck. I had killed the boy I had had a crush on at 12, my teammate, the Hyuuga prodigy.

I heard Lee croak, _has our youth won?_ I was almost sick.

The dust was beginning to settle and already it was clear everybody was dead, mounds of slaughtered ninja everywhere. I didn't even blink at the sight, even when I turned and saw Lee's horrified, pale expression. There was a blank, blank horror in my mind.

"What's the situation?"

I almost screamed at the sound. My neck made a cracking noise as I jerked to look at where Neji's voice had come from, the image of his lonely head staring at me, asking me that, sprouting in my head. But Neji wasn't dead, or headless. He lifted his head out of the gap in his shirt where it had ridden as I grabbed him, almost removing the cloth and covering his face. His white, white eyes blinked at the scene and dust. It was almost comical; stuff that children do to scare other children. A bubble of hysterical laughter rose and burst in my mouth, escaping, and disintegrating as another feeling was awakened. It was tightening my throat, my chest, clutching my stomach, making me feel as if my skin was heating and shrinking into itself, tighter, tighter.

It was **anger**.

"What the hell were you two playing at?" I said, low and soft and with so much hatred that I wondered why their ears didn't sting red. I wanted to revive all the people on the ground and kill them again, and point at them and say; I did what you were struggling to do.

_I could have left you to die. _

"Ten Ten-"

"Shut the fuck up," I snarled at Lee and he gasped, his wide eyes wider until his eyelashes and eyebrows seemed to tangle together. Even Neji seemed surprised and confused, but I didn't care. God, it felt so good not to _care_, because this was the real me. An angry person saying angry things.

"I told you to get out of the way. I said it in a textbook way; clear and loud and in code. What did you not understand from the message?" I whispered.

I had almost killed them. And then a frightening though entered my head.

_Would I have liked it? Would I like doing the same thing to them as they did to me?_

"I am a _part_ of this _team_. If you do not acknowledge me you. will. die." There was something in my throat, impeding breath.

"Ten-Ten we know you are a-"

"No!"

I was drowning.

"_**No!**_" I howled. "Stop deluding yourselves. Stop blinding yourselves!" I screamed and all those pieces I had lost of myself were fluttering around us, just out of reach.

I looked at them and saw gazing back at my face and as if only their eyes permitted me to feel, I began to sense the areas they stared at. I lifted my hand to touch the salty water on my cheeks, turning the dust into streaks of mud.

I was crying. Now, after all this time, I was...crying.

A sob built up in my chest, heaved up my throat and slid past my tongue and teeth to scratch the air. I couldn't stop. I was an earthquake; shaking, destroying. I wailed until my breath run out. I had never cried like that before. It wasn't even crying, it was choking and shivering and vomiting tears and mucus on dry heaves. I wasn't even sure of the reason behind the action. Maybe this was breaking. Maybe this complete, utter, rock-bottom release was breaking.

I don't know how long I was there, but some part of me never left. A little, impossible to lose piece kept on screaming silence and tears as the dam broke.

But the Ten-Ten that lived in the real world quieted down eventually until I could feel and breathe and hear again. My teammates hadn't moved, stunned. I felt so raw and exhausted. Raising my head from where I had bent over myself, I looked at the world, blurred and filled with rainbows from the tears that framed my sight, caught in my eyelashes as they were. It was sunny and distorted, like a dream.

"Everything is in chaos," I whispered. There was a moment of silence before Lee said,

"Ten-Ten?"

"Everything is in chaos," I repeated. "It's beautiful."

"How can you say that?" one of them asked. I blinked and the tears rolled down my cheeks slowly. There were dead bits of flesh before us.

I smiled.

"Because it's proof that I'm alive."

And for the first time in more than a year the breaths I took tasted of more than just oxygen.

**OoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOoOo**

**A/N**

This came about quite forcefully. On Monday I watched a capital punishment video with real footage and in the last case a man was tied, lying on a pit of dry earth as the teacher said _look away if you're sensitive. Look away look away_. They shot him in the stomach and in the leg and he jolted. There was a second where his eyes closed and his groaned in pain- real, non-Hollywood pain- and then he was shot in the face. It was just blasted off. His left cheek and half of his nose was ripped from him. He didn't scream; couldn't. He didn't even bleed very much, it was such muscle and bone. But the most horrifying thing was that he didn't die. He was left there, gasping for air with pain in his widewide eyes, jerking every time he tried to take a breath but couldn't. He was there for 60 seconds, dying.

And then on Tuesday I though it a wonderful idea to watch 'My Boy Jack' as was recommended for my World War One lit. Unit. I can't remember when I last cried like that. After seeing the footage the day before, the reality of the War was made so painfully real that I couldn't even begin to capture how it must have been for those millions and millions of families receiving telegrams telling them their lovers and husbands and sons and brother _may_ be dead, but they don't really know.

Anyway, I just thought it would be nice to understand the feeling behind this, the reality of what some people feel whilst others can't. Please do review and share your thoughts.

Oh, and I recommend the fic 'The Nobody Girl' by 'JACinthebox', which totally inspired this fic. I wouldn't have given TenTen a second thought otherwise. Go read it! After you comment on this, of course :3.


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